


Love, Pyramus

by fairylightsandrainydays



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Fluff, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, Pyramus and Thisbe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26716186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylightsandrainydays/pseuds/fairylightsandrainydays
Summary: Henry wakes up an hour before Alex after their first time and leaves him a note.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 66





	Love, Pyramus

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know in the comments what the heck Alex and Henry's ship name is, I've been using History, Huh, does anyone else have a different one?

What he’s done officially means that he, Prince Henry Fox Mountchristen-Windsor, of England, is supremely fucked.

It’s about 6 in the morning, and he’s sitting up in bed, next to Alex Claremont-Diaz, the First Son of the United States.

The boy he fucked not three hours before.

Henry’s grandmother warned him about this just before he left for uni: that were he to feel any deviant desires towards anyone of his sex, he was to repress them. He has a job to do, and that job is to produce heirs to the throne.

And any other dalliances were wrong and not to be performed.

So why the hell does this feel so right?

Henry majored in English at uni, and has always had a fondness for the Classics.

Ancient myths with morals that always seemed so prevalent, Shakespeare, and, despite what that bloody fact sheet has to say, his favourite author is Jane Austen. Always has, always will be.

There’s a story, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about two lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, forbidden to see each other by their families, there being a great rift between them. Pyramus and Thisbe fall in love speaking through a crack in a wall.

After years of never being able to lay eyes on each other, they make a plan to meet under a mulberry tree. Thisbe arrives before Pyramus and must run from a tiger nearby the tree. In her haste, she drops her veil, which the tiger rips up in her bloody claws. When Pyramus arrives and sees the veil, bloody and torn, he believes that Thisbe has been killed, and stabs himself to join her in the Underworld. When Thisbe returns from hiding, a few minutes later, she is horrified to see a dead Pyramus on the ground, his sword wet with his own blood. She takes it up and stabs herself, following him beyond the veil.

Henry has never felt more like Pyramus than in this very moment. Of course, he’s never considered stabbing himself because the woman (or rather, man, Henry’s gay as a maypole) he loves is dead, but he has considered merely abandoning the crown to be with someone.

That someone is still asleep. That someone, Henry has been pining over for years, and now that he finally has him, he’s being told no, you have to give him up, you have to do what’s best for the crown, you have to produce heirs, you have to live a goddamn heterosexual fairy tale.

Henry knows he isn’t free, he knows Alex isn’t either.

However, he also knows that Alex, stubborn mule that he is, will stop at nothing to make sure that Henry is happy. And if that means going up against the Queen of England herself, putting his mother’s campaign on the line, and losing the faith of all the people he loves, he’ll still do it.

Henry really doesn’t want that to happen.

He doesn’t like it when other people put themselves before him, he knows he doesn’t deserve the love that Alex has for him, or June’s, or Nora’s, or Pez’s, or even Bea for that matter.

But if giving them all the love in the world means that they will be happy, then he’ll give them everything.

He finds a pen and a sheet of paper, scrawls a message on it, sticks it in the pocket of Alex’s embroidered kimono where he knows it may or may not be found, depending on Alex’s mood, and crawls back into bed beside his sleeping love. They have to wake up in an hour, Henry wants to savour every bit of it.

His words, a paraphrase of his feelings, sit waiting for Alex in the kimono pocket.

_Dear Thisbe,_

_I wish there weren’t a wall._

_Love, Pyramus._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading, and kudos and comments are greatly appreciated!  
> <3


End file.
